


she's stealing salt skin

by doyouwannadance



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-04
Updated: 2012-09-04
Packaged: 2017-11-13 13:06:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/503844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doyouwannadance/pseuds/doyouwannadance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's too hot. It feels like time isn't moving down here underground, and the summer is going to last forever; she's never going to stop sweating or feel a cool breeze on the back of her neck, and the humidity is going to smother her until she just stops breathing. It's stupid. She could resurface at any time, but aside from training sessions and pack runs, she doesn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	she's stealing salt skin

**Author's Note:**

> HEAT RISES. An underground hideaway would probably be pretty cool in the summer but HUSH OKAY I'm pretending it makes sense, there are no windows apparently, and we're just gonna go with "the door is broken we don't know how it happened but it was probably Derek". It's probably almost always Derek. Um, anyway, I wrote this. My fan was broken, it was like 30 damn degrees in my room, 2x08 had just aired and a lot of people on tumblr were clamouring for Erica/Isaac. I didn't even realize I shipped it until I started this, but what do you know. One shot, title's paraphrased from the song "Salt Skin" by Ellie Goulding. Unbeta'd, so all mistakes and cases of wow-this-is-really-shitty-writing are my own.

Summer comes, and the old subway station is stifling, underground and windowless. Sweat sticks to Erica's skin, to the crease of her elbow and the small of her back. When she breathes, the air is hot and stale.

The last day of school was weeks ago. Exams are over and suddenly Erica is faced with a blessed amount of free time, even after training and the slightly less consistent emergencies that come with being a werewolf (now that things with the Argents and the Kanima have died down). She thinks maybe she should spend more time at home, try to mend the rocky relationship she has with her family. Or at the very least she could use her free time to go outside, get out of the suffocating heat of Derek's ridiculous hide-out, hit the beach and show off her pretty new swim suit that she's been dying to wear in public.

But she doesn't. There's a reason for it that dies on her lips (bare these days instead of coated in her usual smear of red, because of sweat and the constant touch of water to her mouth) and stays in her brain, but she thinks of how stupid it is and she keeps her mouth shut. She sticks around as if she has nothing better to do, lying out languidly on the slightly cooler metal floors of the train cars with her feet in the air, waiting for Isaac.

He's always here and she could easily pinpoint his location with her sharpened senses, but she doesn't seek him out. She lets him come to her. And every day he finds her around four in the afternoon, when the heat of the midday sun has had time to thoroughly warm their make-shift home, and the air is the hardest to breathe.

Boyd is off having a life most of the time. He's just as much pack as the rest of them, but he also has a biological family that cares about him, an adorable little sister who draws him pictures in crayon, and even a few friends who come to visit from his home town closer to the coast. And Derek? Fuck if he tells them where he's going half the time, but he's usually slightly less broody when he comes back.

So it's just the two of them. Isaac and Erica, at four in the afternoon - every four in the afternoon - for days on end, and there's nothing to do in this heat but sweat and doze off and have quiet, murmured conversations that die off in the middle of sentences and pick up somewhere new and just as quiet. 

They talk about the heat, about the electives they're taking next year, about not-so-old times they spent chasing down hunters and monsters. It all seems less serious now that it's over, more like an adventure to fondly remember than an immediate danger, so they joke about it. They joke about werelizards and grumpy Alphas and being chained up during the full moon. But other times it's not a joke, and they talk about the threats they made and about whether or not they would have followed through given the right circumstances. They talk about the kids they pushed around, the kids that pushed _them_ around, and about waiting outside the McCall house to kill Lydia Martin. Isaac asks her one particularly quiet, particularly hot afternoon, if she thinks things would be different if they'd done it.

"Obviously." She laughs at him. "She wasn't the Kanima. We'd have had the Argents coming down on us even harder, and the Sheriff would have-"

He cuts her off. "No, I mean... do you think we'd be different? You and me? And Derek, and Boyd." His curls stick to his forehead with sweat and Erica frowns. She doesn't reach over to push them back away from his eyes, but it's a close call.

"Well." She hesitates for only a second before answering with conviction. "Yeah. Definitely. Killing someone... it's gotta fuck you up." She lies on her back and stares at the ceiling, looking for patterns in the rust. It just looks like dried blood to her.

"We were pretty fucked up before we even had the chance," Isaac says quietly, and she can feel his eyes on her face even though she doesn't meet them.

She doesn't disagree.

-

The next day she's lying in the exact same spot, twisting the cap of a water bottle on and off. She's using the condensation that forms on it to wipe across her brow, her chest, her arms. It's too hot. It feels like time isn't moving down here underground, and the summer is going to last forever; she's never going to stop sweating or feel a cool breeze on the back of her neck, and the humidity is going to smother her until she just stops breathing. It's stupid. She could resurface at any time, but aside from training sessions and pack runs, she doesn't.

"Why don't you ever go anywhere?" Isaac's strained voice comes from the doorway and doesn't startle her. She watches his eyes follow the icy water that trickles from her collarbone down beneath her shirt. She checks her phone for the time. 4:02 pm. He's certainly reliable.

She doesn't particularly want to answer, but she knows he'd hear a lie in her heartbeat, and she doesn't have anything to hide. "Because you never go anywhere."

"Oh."

-

He starts coming earlier after that - earlier and earlier, until he's there in the cool of the morning and they wait out the rise and fall of the heat together and Erica watches the sheen of sweat form on Isaac's upper lip instead of seeing it there when he arrives. After a while, she reaches over to wipe it off. She feels the stretch of his lips under her thumb as he smiles.

\- 

"You don't feel like you're wasting your summer, do you?" Isaac asks her one day while they're raiding Derek's icebox (dude needs to get with the times) for apples and cold beer, and resting their chins on the edge of it to cool down.

Her "no" is automatic, and it comes out before she can realize she's lying to him. It's not a lie in the way she knows he'll think it is - if she's wasting her summer it's only because she hasn't spent it attached to Isaac at the mouth instead of the metaphorical hip - but he catches it and makes his assumptions. She watches his face shut down.

"Why, do you?" she asks hurriedly.

"Feel like I'm wasting your summer? Absolutely."

She glares at him and stops propping up the lid of the icebox, letting it snap shut on his fingers. He hisses and wrings his hand. "What the _fuck_ -"

"Don't tell me you're so narcissistic that you think you could actually keep me here if I wanted to be somewhere else."

"But that's it, Erica, you could be _anywhere_ else, so-"

"And you couldn't?" 

"Where the hell would I go? You at least have a family. I've got jack." He's sweating harder than he has all summer, and he's just had his head in an icebox. 

She reaches roughly for his hand to check his knuckles even though she knows the slammed lid couldn't have given him more than a scratch, and that it definitely would have already healed. "I think you mean you've got _pack_ ," she says with a smirk, and he laughs at her bad joke. He threads hot fingers through hers, and she can feel his pulse. "I don't want to be with my family," she says, sure of herself, thinking of the vacant look in her mother's eyes and a big brother who comes home with bruises on his face, who yells when he catches her looking. "If you're staying, I'm staying. I want to be here." She wants to be where he is, but she doesn't say it. She's still used to rejection, even after the werewolf bite makeover, but that isn't what stops her this time. She's just sure that Isaac can read it on her face.

She pushes those soaked curls off his forehead and kisses him on the mouth, with only an arch of her eyebrows as warning. Her hand grips the back of his neck and she pulls his chest to hers, fingers wet when they touch his shirt. She's sure his are too. But he's kissing her back and she pulls him along until she can sit on top of the icebox and fit him between her thighs. Their hands slide on each other's skin and when Isaac rocks into her, she bites his lip, threads her fingers through his hair and tugs. She touches and he's burning just like every day of the summer; the air is even thicker, pressing closer, and if the humidity was smothering her before, it's got it's hands around her throat now and it's squeezing.

Isaac pulls his mouth away, but his hands don't leave her face, and he presses his forehead to hers.

He's short of breath, but he asks, "Want to get out of here?"

She laughs - throws her head back and laughs, expelling the hot air from her lungs. "With you? Yeah."


End file.
